In the Oct. 14 SN: 2017’s scientists to watch, duel over a real-life Brienne of Tarth, the origin of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays, long-lasting spheres of color, watermelon snow’s downside, support for the Unruh effect, polite robots and more.

Pluto has no rings — New Horizons triple-checked. An exhaustive search for rings and dust particles around the dwarf planet before, during and after the spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2015 has come up empty.

“It’s a very long paper to say we didn’t find anything,” says team member Tod Lauer of the analysis, posted online September 23 at arXiv.org. But the nonresult could help scientists...

The reappearance of a long-lost meteor shower has finally explained what happened to a missing comet named 289P/Blanpain.

That comet was spotted only once in 1819 and never again, unusual for a body orbiting the sun. But in 2003, astronomers found a small asteroid moving along the Blanpain orbit, suggesting the space rock might be the comet (or a piece of it) after...

When Hurricane Maria’s 250-kilometer-per-hour winds slammed into Puerto Rico on September 20, they spurred floods, destroyed roads and flattened homes across the island. A week-and-a-half later, parts of the island remain without power, and its people are facing a humanitarian crisis.

The storm also temporarily knocked out one of the best and biggest eyes on the sky: the Arecibo...

Ice in space may break out the bubbly. Zapping simulated space ice with imitation starlight makes the ice bubble like champagne. If this happens in space, this liquidlike behavior could help organic molecules form at the edges of infant planetary systems. The experiment provides a peek into the possible origins of life.

After 20 years in space and 13 years orbiting Saturn, the veteran spacecraft spent its last 90 seconds or so firing its thrusters as hard as it could to keep sending Saturnian secrets back to Earth for as long as possible.

The spacecraft entered Saturn’s atmosphere at about 3:31 a.m. PDT on September 15 and immediately began running...

Here are the final images from Cassini’s last look around the Saturn system.

In its last hours before plunging into Saturn’s atmosphere, the Cassini spacecraft turned its cameras to the mission team’s favorite objects: the hydrocarbon-shrouded moon Titan, the geyser moon Enceladus and, of course, the majestic rings.

It’s not every day that a spacecraft gets vaporized by the very planet it sought to explore.

After 13 years studying Saturn and its moons, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will plunge into the ringed gas giant’s atmosphere. The mission will come to a close at about 7:55 a.m. EDT (4:55 a.m. PDT) Friday, when Saturn’s atmosphere pushes Cassini’s antenna away from Earth,...

The Cassini spacecraft has snapped its penultimate pics of Saturn’s moon Titan.

This image, shot September 11 as Cassini swung past the moon at a distance of about 119,049 kilometers, shows Titan’s lake region near its north pole. “The haze has cleared remarkably as the summer solstice has approached,” Cassini Project Scientist Linda Spilker said in a news conference September 13.

After one last swing past Titan, the Cassini spacecraft is now plunging to its doom. At 3:04 p.m. EDT (12:04 p.m. PDT) on September 11, the spacecraft used a gravitational nudge from Saturn’s largest moon to set itself on a collision course with the giant planet’s atmosphere on September 15.

Cassini’s last close flyby of Titan on April 21 curved the spacecraft’s orbit to...